We Should Not Have to Be Ashamed of Our Cities

When Americans hear of "no-go zones," images of tense European neighborhoods overrun by Middle Eastern and North African immigrants usually come to mind—places where many native Europeans fear to tread, and police hesitate to patrol. 

But look closer to home, and you'll find America's own version of no-go zones that most Americans not only tolerate but accept as the way things are. 

In areas surrounding America’s grandest civic monuments—the 18th century courtyards and iron balconies of New Orleans, the Victorian neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., or the uniquely American early skyscraper and Flounder architectures of St. Louis—lie neighborhoods engulfed in crime and decay. 

The middle class has long since made its peace with this decay. Cities maintain small strips of relative safety around convention centers and tourist areas like the French Quarter and the National Mall. Beyond those buffers, however, the social contract frays. 

Even the last vestige of urban magnetism—professional sports teams—are giving up and moving to areas where spectators can safely walk and tailgate, as is the case with the Cleveland Browns and Chicago Bears. Rather than scenic lakefront stadiums that anchor urban vitality, these teams have retreated to suburban domes, surrounded by cookie-cutter parking lots and fast-food drive-thrus.

This acquiescence doesn’t owe to the convenience of suburbs or even the automobile. The modern American suburb developed before the automobile, and American inner cities reached their zenith long after most people owned cars. 

No, the great uprooting began in the 1960s because of unchecked crime that turned vibrant blocks into post-civilizational ghettoes. 

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Here’s Why Abandoning Our Cities Harms America

Many middle-class Americans ignore inner city blight because they’ve long given up recovering the America of their grandparents’ childhood and prefer to cordon off safe spaces for themselves and their children. This has caused once-prosperous, scenic neighborhoods like Chicago’s South Shore and Washington, D.C.’s Anacostia to become no-go zones like immigrant heavy neighborhoods in the Parisian suburbs.

But surrendering key neighborhoods near downtowns hurts the country more than tolerating a few blighted suburbs. America needs its cities. Turning them into no-go zones for the middle class’s housing, work, and leisure distorts settlement and infrastructure patterns. 

This hurts the country’s rule of law and image; it damages the country economically and socially by reducing productivity, happiness, and national cohesion; and it harms the country’s future by limiting upward mobility.

It Hurts the Rule of Law

Today, many American cities that once symbolized national pride symbolize instead national embarrassment. 

In 2023, Washington, D.C. recorded a homicide rate of over 40 per 100,000. Last year, St. Louis hit 69, Memphis topped 50, and New Orleans surpassed 40. All these numbers exceed those in some of the world’s most unstable countries. Visitors don’t need a policy paper to see the problem. They see it from their Uber windows. Boarded-up row houses, tent cities under overpasses, and the omnipresent fear of street crime define too many downtowns that once showcased America’s prosperity and culture.

These are not minor embarrassments—they’re public warnings. When a country’s capital and great river cities become places people avoid rather than explore, it signals either national decline or cultural abandonment.  

To let America’s architectural heritage molder, boarded up and bullet-ridden, is to inadvertently echo the iconoclastic fervor of communist regimes, which razed or abandoned their pre-Marxist cultures to impose functionality above all else. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Without the tolerance of crime-ridden inner cities, America’s urban civilization would evolve much like those of other longstanding advanced countries.

It Hampers Economic Progress and Quality of Life

The consequences of allowing cities to develop no-go zones ripple beyond the crime tape, eroding America’s economic potential through the quiet hemorrhage of productivity, civic life, and social tranquility.

Cities will always be society's natural nerve centers. They concentrate commerce and transportation, amplifying human potential through proximity. 

When suburbs develop naturally, industry, commerce, and leisure hubs don’t relocate. Natural suburban residents also ensure the city’s downtown remains easily accessible. 

When suburbs develop unnaturally because of inner city transplants fleeing crime or bad politics, they dissipate that energy, and the transplants make it as difficult as possible for the urban world they left behind to reach them. This hampers prosperity and social cohesion. 

This crime-driven sprawl didn’t work terribly in the 1960s and 70s when corn fields surrounded urban centers, and traffic remained light. But, as the country’s population increases, this model is reproducing the congested sprawl of Los Angeles nationwide.

The financial and social costs of this are immense. 

Despite the U.S. having a far superior road infrastructure to most countries, Americans still average 23 minutes one-way in their automobile commutes. That’s because even in the 18 largest U.S. cities, over 90 percent of American workers rely on personal cars to get to work. 

Most who use public transit do so only if they must and average a whopping 59-minute commute. This third world sluggishness owes to most American cities lacking a functioning, modern transit system that the middle class uses or cares to invest in.

This is due as much to fear of utilizing public transportation as its obsolescence. 

Under-policed cities exacerbate suburban sprawl by driving middle class residents away from transit hubs. Viral acts of violence on public transit further reinforce the middle class’s fears of using it. This creates a taxing and dangerous congestion on suburbs they aren’t planned to handle like cities are.

Rather than be able to live close to work or complete tasks and decompress on safe public transit, workers must remain vigilant in rush-hour traffic with equally stressed drivers. Family time, side hustles, and civic engagement suffer for lack of time, morale, and discretionary income.

If urban crime hadn’t driven away so much of the middle-class, America’s roads would be much safer because commute times would be shorter, and public transit would still thrive—meaning bad drivers wouldn’t need cars.

Instead, America’s car-dependent culture is highly lethal. People are five times likelier to die in a car crash in the U.S. than in the UK, and it’s the leading cause of death for Americans ages 5–23—surpassing firearms. 

It Limits Upward Mobility

The middle-class’s abandonment of cities has relegated many in low-opportunity neighborhoods to generational poverty. By contrast, healthy cities, with a broad range of social classes, increase upward mobility by offering the lower classes cheap transportation and cross-class interaction.

Well-developed public transit increases upward mobility due to the ease with which it allows the ambitious poor to chase work and educational opportunities beyond their zip code. One Harvard study identifies commute duration as the paramount predictor of escaping poverty, surpassing even crime rates and education in some models. 

Middle class abandonment, however, has caused public transit in most American cities to become as underfunded and crime-ridden as the streets it traverses. Lacking a safe or efficient means to get to jobs that pay a living wage, many of the urban poor turn to substance abuse or crime. 

Safe, thriving cities also create greater social trust and networking opportunities by fostering daily interactions across class and political boundaries. When folks from lower socioeconomic circumstances have opportunities to interact with successful people, it encourages them to think on a bigger scale and gives them greater access to people who can help them improve their lives.

The Solution—Use the National Guard to Take Back Our Streets

It’s not too late to turn our cities around.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, tough-on-crime policies caused the urban pendulum to slowly swing back. Yuppies moved downtown, drawn by cheap real estate and the promise of tight-knit neighborhoods. Crime fell, new businesses boomed, urban infrastructure improved, and it seemed as if America’s great cities were finally rebounding.

Then came the one-two punch in 2020. 

The COVID-19 pandemic increased remote work, dispersing high-earning renters in search of cheaper real estate and caused nanny state liberals to apply remedies that drove away middle-class families.

The simultaneous corporate-backed Black Lives Matter riots caused cities to devolve into their mid- 20th century selves. Local officials defunded police departments, liberal review boards micromanaged officers’ conduct, and prosecutors stopped doing their jobs. The progress of 20 years vanished almost overnight. Five years later, most cities still have not recovered.

President Donald Trump deserves credit for doing what state leaders should have been doing long ago—restoring order in inner cities. His decision to deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C. forced even NPR to admit its success, and the recent deployment to Memphis has surged the arrest of violent criminals with outstanding warrants. Memphis’s Democrat Mayor Paul Young notably supports this deployment and refuses to take part in a Democrat-led lawsuit against it. 

For too long, Republican leaders in red states have quietly allowed urban decay. Take Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville’s June 2025 jab at Governor Gavin Newsom, comparing Los Angeles with a “third-world country.” Newsom fired back that Alabama’s homicide rate is triple California’s. 

Alabama has 3X the homicide rate of California.

Its murder rate is ranked third in the entire country.

Stick to football, bro. https://t.co/xaRrF0B7Zs

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 9, 2025

Newsom Lurches Into the Truth Despite Himself

Newsome wasn’t wrong. In Alabama, with its Republican trifecta and legislative supermajority, the 2023 homicide rate was 14.8 per 100,000. California, with its Democrat trifecta and legislative supermajority, had a rate of 5.1. 

Similarly, in Louisiana and Mississippi—both states where Republicans hold legislative supermajorities—the homicide rates were the highest in the nation, at 19.3 and 19.4 respectively.

Violent crime is a red-state stain that too many conservatives ignore while blaming “blue cities” for America’s lack of safety. 

That’s because many Republican officials and donors live far from violent neighborhoods, tucked away in gated exurbs. They treat violent crime in their states as Democrat mayors’ problem, using it as a cudgel over those mayors’ heads when political conflict inevitably arises. 

This attitude hides two failures. 

First, it avoids a frank conversation about crime and race. The presence of illegal aliens and the existence of big cities aren’t what drives America’s third-world crime rate. It’s black Americans’ disproportionate criminality.

Secondly, it excuses Republicans’ stinginess, which is a backhanded form of racism. Some red state conservatives balk at spending money to police overwhelming black areas that vote Democrat, as if public safety were a racial or partisan privilege. 

The irony is that Republican governors already have the tools to act. They control National Guard units and could declare inner city crime a state-level emergency. This would, of course, invite the same lawsuits and political pushback now aimed at Trump. But neglect is far costlier. When cities rot, states lose investment, tourism, and human capital. It also limits the upward mobility of those stuck in those cities.

Trump’s use of the National Guard to make American cities safe again proves that decisive leadership works. Restoring law and order shouldn’t just be a campaign slogan for Republicans or a policy aimed at Republican-majority communities. Restoring law and order doesn’t require new ideas—just the will to use the tools taxpayers already fund.

Civilization begins with safety and order. By deploying the National Guard to dangerous, blighted cities, Trump has shown that restoring safety and order to American urban life is possible. If Republican governors follow this model, red state cities like St. Louis, New Orleans, Memphis, and others will set the standard for economic growth, upward mobility, and restored beauty that will attract visitors and investment and become the envy of blue states—and the rest of the world. The decline of urban American is not inevitable—it’s a choice. But so is its renewal. That renewal begins the moment we decide no-go zones have no place in American cities because they and the people in them are worth fighting for.

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